Just to clarify, a school “district” is the employer of teachers and administrators. The majority of teachers work for ONE district for the entirety of their teaching career. WITHIN that district (especially if a large urban district) student performance benchmarks in any given school can vary year to year and decade to decade. Already employed teachers don’t bid to work in a particular district …. they’re already employed there. Each school district in CA has school sites with varying student performance data, often wildly varying. If teachers want to change their school assignment within their district (their employer’s worksites), they attempt to bid for a new worksite (school) in the spring before the new academic year begins. Those bids are granted on the basis of number of openings in the bid-upon school and in order of seniority of the bidder (teacher).
OTOH, public school “principals” are unrepresented (CAR, correct me if I’m wrong here). They can and will be transferred from school site to school site at the whim of their employing district. Principals, although “supervisors” of a school site, have very little (if any) decision making capacity as it relates to curriculum or facilities. For instance they CAN decide which direction and how parent traffic should flow in the mornings and afternoons in the front parking lot of their site and issue a parent bulletin to that effect but they CAN’T decide if a local scout group will be allowed to use the school cafeteria after school for regular meetings. Principals can’t use ANY stationary for parent announcements/bulletins which does not identify both their school site AND the district to which that school site belongs.
Practically speaking, “public schools” are NOT entities in and of themselves. They are “worksites” and “learning sites” within a particular district. Public school districts are “subdivisions” within the State of CA, just as cities and counties are. When I see Piggs here complaining about particular school sites, they often should be complaining about District decisions. The vast majority of complaints parents have about a particular school should be taken to their District superintendent’s office. Yes, CA public school administrators’ and teachers’ hands really ARE tied and there are very good reasons for that.
I can’t understand where the complaints in the article re: union rules keeping “bad teachers” in the lowest performing schools are coming from when a good portion of the teachers in those schools don’t even have tenure yet! These newbies have to start somewhere. As soon as they are able to successfully bid on a slightly better-performing school assignment, some will transfer out. Some will stay on longer to obtain student-loan forgiveness on their remaining balance before attempting to move on.
Any long-tenured teachers teaching in underperforming schools are doing it primarily because they want to give back to their community and make a difference in their student’s lives. Very often, they themselves graduated from the same or nearby school in the same district, have a lot of family living in the immediate area, have residential rentals in the immediate area or all three. Their (now “underperforming”) school assignment has always been “home” to them. They know their way around and “know” from whence their students came and what their daily lives are like.
You can’t blame these teachers for low student performance. Most of them taught at that same (or nearby) school when the student performance at that school was much higher. Public school teachers have no control over the following:
– a school attendance area slowly changing from a primarily SFR area to multifamily area (ex: North Park SD);
– hundreds of new construction units in a school attendance area set aside for low-income tenants; (ex: any number of newer areas in both North and South SD County);
– a proliferation of social services for homeless families moving into a school attendance area (ex: Southcrest SD [from dtn and East Village]);
– the exit of large corporations and defense contractors in a school district attendance areas leaving many previously well-employed parents unemployed; (ex: Solar Turbines, Gen Dyn, Rohr, etc)
– the construction of high property-tax subdivisions (w/ HOA/MR) in an established school district attendance area, overloading the schools and causing the parents of the newer students to realize they must work several jobs between them to pay 3-10 times the property tax (incl HOA) than the parents of students residing in the established areas.
– soaring property values in a school attendance area, causing families with children to either move in with well-established relatives or to a nearby rental apartment in order to remain in the area, where in past decades, parents of minor children were buying single family homes in the area. (ex: Pt Loma HS and feeder schools)
– the construction or conversion of hundreds of units of military housing in a given attendance area, causing some schools to have disproportionate numbers of “temporary” students of ~2 years attendance duration who are often enrolling and withdrawing at different times of the school year in groups and who may not be present for the CAHSEES and other academic performance measuring testing after attending a particular school most of the school year as a “stat.”
I could go on here, but suffice to say, many public HS’s in SD County which were considered “excellent” in 1974, 1984, 1994 or 2004 and are now considered just “average” or “mediocre” in 2014 may end up again to be “high performing” in 2024, all depending upon the whims of local politicians and military decisions from on high.
Public school teachers must work with the raw material that is before them and that “raw material” is each student along with whatever “baggage” they can’t help but bring to the classroom every day. We can’t blame public school teachers just because certain groups of students do better than others and there are currently less of those better-performing groups in attendance at their school assignment.
